Re: [BUG] GRUBs option parsing needs fixing

[Andreas Vogel]

Am 08.03.2012 16:18, schrieb Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko:
> On 08.03.2012 16:03, Andreas Vogel wrote:
>> Am 08.03.2012 15:32, schrieb Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko:
>>> On 08.03.2012 15:15, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
>>>> On 08.03.2012 14:12, Andreas Vogel wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I start a new thread with this mail in order to have a thread on its
>>>>> own
>>>>> for this subject.
>>>> Please don't CC Colin Watson (or me for that matter) for everything,
>>>> it's bad tone.
>> I just used Reply-All in my mail program, so please excuse me and I
>> really hope that i didn't offend anyone, it was not by purpose.
> Don't Reply or Reply-All to start a new thread. It messes up with
> threading.

Didn't i write that it was by accident?? What else can i do other than
to beg for pardon?

>>>>> In another thread we've already had some discussion about GRUBs
>>>>> option
>>>>> parsing. I wanna summarize and describe here about the issue.
>>>>>
>>>>> Right now I see 2 problems with GRUBs argument parsing:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) GRUBs argum      ent parsing is not POSIX compliant.
>>>> We don't follow POSIX.
>> But you were telling that you follow GNU, right? And regarding this
>> subject GNU follows POSIX, qed.
>>
> We don't have to recreate whole GNU in GRUB either, we don't write an
> OS but a bootloader. In particular having -xfoo for isn't necessarry
> and moreover it will conflict with
> search -su <UUID>
> which is already used in the wild.
> The case of --long-option optional argument can be changed especially
> taking into account migration from 1.98 but -xfoo is probably out of
> the question.
>

C'mon, I'm talking about the GNU conventions/recommendations regarding
argument parsing. I'm not talking about the GNU operating system, I
thought I made it clear by even giving the link to that document.

Without being able to parse '-xfoo' you will not be able to handle
optional arguments in a consistent way. Because of this I disagree:
"-xfoo" is necessary.
You are right, "search -su UUID" demonstrates perfectly the weakness of
the actual argument parsing. It's just buggy.
If nothing will be changed for short options, at least you need to
mention in the manual that "search -s -u UUID" is OK but "search -u -s
UUID" is NOT OK.
And you need to mention that "search -su UUID" is OK but "search -us
UUID" is NOT OK.

I'm just mentioning the problems. If you or whoever decide that it's
impossible  to fix this (e.g. because of backward compatibility), that's
another issue. Don't let's mix arguments for how smth should be and what
the consequences will be.